11 - How to Import text from Microsoft Word into Adobe InDesign.

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at bringing in type from Word, or an email, or look at typing it in yourself, in InDesign. We're just going to put in a bit of text here for our little flyer. So you ready? Let's go and do it.

To add text by yourself, grab the 'Type' tool, this capital 'T' here. And all you need to do is click, hold, and drag out a box. Now, like we do with the images, if I start dragging over the top of boxes, I've already made some weird stuff start happening, so if I click in here, you can see, its kind of fused this box with that box, and its kind of a bit weird, it's a weird InDesign quirk. So what I'm going to do is, have nothing selected, click in the background, grab my 'Type' tool, and what I'm going to do is click, hold, and drag a box over here, on the side. If you need more room, see these little sliders, we can just move across down the bottom here and we can start typing. If I start typing over here, obviously I can put anything I like. I can grab my black arrow to resize the box to the size it needs to be.

What I'm going to do is import some text. So I'm going to use this 'Text' box. I’m going to use my black arrow, just move it over here, and what I'm going to do is, select all this 'Type' with my 'Type' tool, which is the capital 'T'. Just delete it all, and I'm going to import some text. There's two ways of doing it, you can do the cave men style, which works perfectly. I'm going to jump to Word, actually let's open the Word document, its part of your exercise files. Find your exercise files. Here's mine on my 'Desktop', I've downloaded it. Under '01 Flyer' there's one in here called 'Flyer Text'. I'm going to double click and open it. I'm going to copy all this text. I've selected it all, go to 'Edit', 'Copy'. If you're on a PC, its slightly different, there's a copy button in the corner, or 'Control C'. Whatever you do, select it, copy it, jump back into InDesign. In here, I'm going to paste it. You can totally do it that way.

Often that's what I do, you might be copying from an email, or anything. What you can do though to be a bit more official and to get a few more options in that copy, is I'm going to delete it all, have my cursor flashing in here, I'm going to go 'File', 'Place'. I've got some text. I found my '01 Flyer', there's the 'Flyer Text'. Just kind of goes around using Word. So open, and you can see, its dumped it in there. Now the difference between the two is very little in what we're doing, but what you can do, and what we'll do later on in my more advanced sections, instead of going to 'File', 'Place', there's an option in here that says, 'Options', 'Show Import Options'. That means, when I bring in my Word document I get to keep some of the styles that might be in there. Maybe there's a Table of Contents, that sort of stuff. I'm going to turn that off. Hide that for the moment. Doesn't really matter how you bring in text as long as we've got some text.

Now with my black arrow, I'm going to drag this box. I'm going to make the box so it kind of fits in here appropriately. Within my margins. Under the logo here. And what I want to do is, I'm going to use my 'Type' tool. Now you notice I don't jump to the 'Type' tool, I just double click inside the box and it automatically jumps to the 'Type' tool, that's up to you. So I'm going to select it all and I'm going to do some basic Type stuff now. If you're happy with formatting type you might want to skip along, we're going to do some of the basics.

We're going to pick a font, we'll just pick 'Arial' because I know everyone has got Arial. I use 'Arial Bold' for bits of it. I'm going to select all again, and along the top here, you've got these two options. You might be happy with bold, and sizes, and stuff, but you'll notice that these two here have very different kind of settings and we need a lot of them. 'Character' and 'Paragraph' is the actual names of these. 'Character' has my basic character stuff. You can see, all the way down here, there's some paragraph, it's only because my screen is very large. If you've got a smaller laptop, you might not be able to see any of these. You're going to have to jump to 'Paragraph', and you can see there. You might have to toggle between these two.

I want to go to the one that says 'Align Center'. I'm going to highlight this top bit, and I'm going to make it-- my colors over here, I'm going to select the-- I'm not going to use dark green at all, I'm actually just going to use white which is 'Paper', over here. I've selected 'Paper', I'm going to go back to 'Character'. I'm going to make it 'All Caps'. I'm going to capitalize it all. In terms of the font size, I'm going to pick a font size. What font size? I don't know. I'm going to go to about there. So '22 pt'. Go back to my black arrow, click in the background. It's maybe a bit close to this, I might like it to come down a bit.

Couple of things I want to do is, I'm going to select this, make it a little bigger. And I'm going to use my green so I'm going to use the mid green. This last URL here, I'm going to select it all, make it-- I'm going to leave it the same size, but I'm going to use the dark green. All right, black arrow, click out. And that my friends is the basics of importing text. You can either just draw a text box, copy and paste it into it, or you can go to 'File', 'Place', up to you. We're not going to go through everything-- with this font selected here-- I'm not going to go through what is 'Subscript' and 'Tracking'. We'll look at some of the more advanced ones a little bit later on, but they are the basics in here, and everyone knows what right align and left align is, I hope.

If you're not sure of some of the experiments we will go through more and more as we get through this course. For the moment now, we've got our font, we've got our text in, we've got some images. Let's get on to our next video.